


Vlad Pulls an Edward Cullen

by Omegarose



Series: A Backwards Fate [3]
Category: Castlevania (Cartoon)
Genre: F/M, Hurt/Comfort, Lisa is a Good Mom, No Season 3 Spoilers, No Spoilers, adrian doesn't explain much, adrian freaks out, but he will, but she's tired goddamnit, lisa tries to keep a level head, so vlad freaks out, takes place after chapter three, vlad and lisa don't know what's going on but they're trying their best, vlad is a good dad, vlad/lisa pov
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-07
Updated: 2020-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-01 00:49:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,956
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23056525
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Omegarose/pseuds/Omegarose
Summary: (the title is in reference to like...the first paragraph but whatever)Vlad and Lisa react to Adrian's sudden panic attack, from their perspective.Takes place immediately following chapter three of A Backwards Fate.
Relationships: Dracula/Lisa (Castlevania)
Series: A Backwards Fate [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1633255
Comments: 16
Kudos: 292





	Vlad Pulls an Edward Cullen

Vlad was passing the early morning hours as usual, watching over his wife as she slept.

As soon as the sun began to pinken the horizon he would be able to fall asleep, and a handful of hours after that Lisa would wake up and leave the bed, and a few hours after that he would awaken to the soon-to-darken winter afternoon.

_((It distressed him to not be spending as many moments as he could with Lisa. She only had so many decades left. But she insisted he sleep enough, and offered instead to stay awake a little later than humans usually would, and sleep in later to give them more time together. He still felt it wasn’t enough. He would never have enough of her.))_

Lisa’s heartbeat was a sure and steady thud, her breath an even rasp. A few rooms away their son slept just as soundly.

Or, at least, Adrian had been soundly sleeping. His heart rate and breathing had suddenly spiked. Vlad waited for it to slow to a more regular waking pace, as was usual when Adrian woke himself from a nightmare, but if anything it only got worse.

Vlad slipped from the bed, pressing a quick kiss to his wife’s forehead as he went.

He kept an ear focused on Adrian’s vitals, worried for what might have frightened him so. He wasn’t prone to be scared by much, not with Vlad forbidding any creature of the night to lay a finger on him, or allow any harm to come to pass. The only time Vlad could remember such prolonged fear like this from Adrian was when he fell into an acromantula nest, a few years ago.

He pushed the door open. Adrian’s head snapped towards him.

Adrian was shaking, sat up as close as he could to the head board. He seemed terrified, even as he looked at his father. His eyes were unfocused, wide, pupils dilated to slits. His heart was beating rapidly and his lungs worked so quickly that Vlad was afraid he would start to hyperventilate.

Vlad scanned the room, but just as he thought there were no intruders—not even a few skittering bugs or a silent shade. There was certainly a small disturbance to the latent magic within the castle’s structures, but that was common and hardly cause for concern.

“Adrian, are you alright?” he asked, reaching out as if to a spooked animal. He almost expected his son to come to him for comfort, but his claws extended and dug into his palms. The acrid scent of his not-quite-human-not-quite-monstrous blood spiked in the air.

He moved closer to the bed, intent on unfurling Adrian’s hands at the least. “Adrian, son, calm down it was only a-”

Something about the way Adrian was acting—was panicking—caused Vlad to rethink his approach.

He put his hand on his son’s shoulder, calling softly, “Adrian-"

But the moment his hand met Adrian’s shoulder the dhampir all but flung himself away, snarling through his fangs—“Get away from me!”

Vlad froze.

Was Adrian afraid of...him? His own father?

Vlad knew he was imposing—tall and almost hulking, dead-pallor, blood-red irises, black razor claws, fangs that were impossible to hide—but Adrian had never shown even hesitance before, not even as a babe or if he’d been startled by Vlad’s habit of making sudden appearances from the shadows or if he woke from a nightmare.

Adrian fell to the floor, stumbling, and then he was shifting his shape into that of a white wolf. Before the shift was even fully complete Adrian was bolting from the room and down the hall.

Vlad was too shocked to fully appreciate the ease of the shift, or the fluidity of the movement. He just watched after his son for another handful of moments, churning fear and revulsion and worry making him feel almost sick.

~~~

Lisa was rudely awaken from a very nice dream involving a meadow, a picnic, and a talking rabbit by her vampire husband.

“Wha’s’it?”

The sun wasn’t even peaking through the curtains yet. Honestly, the dramatics of it all could make Vlad unthinking of the little comforts that humans needed more than the average night creature.

“It’s Adrian, he had a nightmare, I think, but when I went to him he only ran from me.”

Lisa struggled to catch up to Vlad’s hurried words. There wasn’t much of an explanation there.

“He had a nightmare?”

“Yes.”

“So you went to check on him?”

“He wasn’t calming down, he was close to a full fit of panic, if he wasn’t in one.”

A fit of panic? What could have possibly sent her son into a fit of panic? She could hardly see through her sleep-filled eyes that watered in the shadowy darkness of their bedroom, and she felt as if she might still be half asleep as it was.

“He was panicking? Over what?”

“I don’t know, he ran from me.”

“He ran…”

“I tried to touch him—he was hurting himself with his talons, and I was only going to stop him—but when I touched him he flinched and ran!”

That didn’t sound like Adrian, but then again Vlad rarely got so worked up. He seemed genuinely worried, and—scared? Scared because their son flinched away from him, scared of what that meant for him.

Lisa knew her husband, and she knew that _((barring the slight possibility this was a rather odd twist to the dream she had been having))_ he was likely scared that Adrian’s fear had been warranted. It had been less than a human lifetime since he’d put away the worst of his ways, ways he had been living for centuries.

“Okay. Where did he go?”

Vlad’s gaze went momentarily distant as he spread his senses to locate their son in the vastness of the castle. “Somewhere in the guest wing, second or third floor, I think.”

Lisa nodded. “Alright. I’m going to look for him, then. See what all the fuss was about.”

She begrudgingly pulled herself out of bed, mumbling thanks as her husband appeared with her warmest dressing gown and slippers. The castle was cold almost always, but especially so now that the snow was falling.

Vlad only spoke once she was nearly to the bedroom door. “Oh, and you might not be looking for a boy. He ran off as a wolf.”

She turned to face him. He sat on the bed, and if she hadn’t known him as well as she did she would have laughed at how comical he looked in bedclothes, surrounded by numerous pillows and quilts. He didn’t seem to have heard anything strange with what he’d said. “A wolf?”

“Yes? Has he not told you? I have been helping him with his transformations, ever since we learned he might be able to do it. He’s getting quite good at it, but he can only turn into a wolf as of yet.”

Lisa fought the urge to kick off her slippers and bury herself back under the blankets. It was too early for her to be dealing with her husband’s doubts and her half-vampire son who could apparently turn into an animal.

“Sure, he might be a wolf. Naturally. Third floor, you said?”

“More likely it’s the second.”

She nodded and headed off to search the large expanses of empty guest rooms on the second floor.

It felt like hours of checking under beds and in wardrobes before she came across a somewhat smaller room that had obviously been disturbed recently, though it mustn’t have taken all that long. The dust on the floor was disturbed, the door closed but not properly latched, a pitiful sounding snuffling coming from beneath the bed.

“Adrian, baby, is that you?”

There was movement from under the bed, but no answer.

She lowered herself to the floor, mindless of the dust, sitting cross-legged on the rug. “Well, if it turns out you’re some sort of monstrous thing that I’ll be talking to, the worst it can do is feel awkward.”

More shuffling.

“Baby...whatever it is that scared you, it’s okay. You gave your father quite a fright, and you know just as well as I do that he doesn’t know how to handle things like this, but I’m here now.”

A small, wet nose peeked out from under the shadows of the bed, yellow eyes glowing above it. So Vlad hadn’t been lying about the wolf thing.

“There’s my sweet boy,” she cooed. “Are you going to come out and let me see you?”

He inched forward on his belly, revealing his white head, but staying beneath the bed.

“There he is.” She didn’t try to reach for him, not when he was so clearly spooked and had such sharp teeth so near to where she would touch—not that he didn’t, usually, have dangerous teeth, though he usually wasn’t hiding under a bed in the shape of a wolf. “Imagine my shock when your father told me that you could turn yourself into a wolf. Keeping secrets from me, are you two?”

She kept talking, letting him come to her. It was slow going, but soon she had a lapful of juvenile white wolf and a hand stroking his head and ruff.

“Going to turn back, tell me what’s wrong?” she asked him softly.

He shuddered, and for a moment she thought he would refuse and she would continue speaking of nothing, but quite suddenly she had her arms full of gangly teenage-boy _((he looked older than he should at ten, something to do with his conflicting natures trying to force a balance))_.

He was crying, face pressed into her shoulder, clinging to her dressing gown, shaking with nearly-silent sobs.

“There we are, there we are, oh, baby, that’s it, I’m right here.”

She held him and comforted him until he had stopped crying, though he refused to move when she’d tried to get him to look at her.

“Can you tell me what’s wrong, baby?” she asked, smoothing his hair and trying hard as she could to ignore the stiffness in her folded-up legs.

“Terrible things,” he whispered. “There are—I saw—horrible, awful, terrible things.”

She could tell she wasn’t going to be getting anything else out of him, not right now. “Alright, baby, it’s okay now.”

He let go of her, just enough to wipe at his face with one of his hands.

“Why don’t we go upstairs, I’m afraid it’s a bit too early for me to be awake. We can have a nice lie in, hm? I’m sure your father’s been wondering what we’ve been getting up to.”

Adrian didn’t say anything else, just trailing after her, holding her draping sleeve like a child much younger than he was afraid of losing sight of his mother, sniffing periodically and wiping at his eyes.

Vlad was still awake, standing near the still-curtained windows that were most definitely concealing the early morning light. He turned towards them quickly, faltering back a step just as suddenly.

“Let’s get some rest,” Lisa said, ushering their stubbornly mute son into the bed, folding quilts around him. He looked impossibly small on their large bed, face blank aside from when she moved away and the slightest look of panic would cross his eyes.

“Vlad, love, you too.”

They bracketed Adrian—Vlad hesitant, but Adrian didn’t react to his father’s presence—Lisa pressing a quick kiss to both of their foreheads before burrowing under the covers herself. 

She was tired, and Vlad needed his sleep for the day, and Adrian was undoubtedly exhausted from whatever had unsettled him so. They would all feel better once they had woken up, later.

**Author's Note:**

> Adrian is probably freaking the hell out at being put to bed between his two dead parents, but too confused and shocked to protest it!
> 
> I'm going to post the same message I attached to my post-season 3 fic that I posted earlier this morning (at like, midnight, but you know still technically today)--I'm going to edit these stories to fit in with season three, but do any of you have any strong opinions on if I should wait a few weeks to post the edits? Otherwise I might slowly be editing a couple of things around.
> 
> [You can find my tumblr here!](https://omegros.tumblr.com)
> 
> Edits made 8/10/2020


End file.
